


Half Sick of Shadows

by halotolerant



Category: Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Amnesia, Companions, M/M, Memories, Memory Loss, TARDIS rooms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-30
Updated: 2013-12-30
Packaged: 2018-01-06 18:48:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1110292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The Doctor probably finds the Hall because he isn’t searching for it</i>
</p><p> </p><p>(Mild spoilers for 'Time of the Doctor')</p>
            </blockquote>





	Half Sick of Shadows

**Author's Note:**

> Having been following New Who for years now, I've recently started up on Classic Who (thank you, 50th Anniversary documentaries!) and discovered Two/Jamie. So I decided to dip a toe into writing fic involving the Doctor for the first time, with amnesiac!Twelve searching and finding some very old memories...

Between the running and screaming and saving the universe, there’s also quiet, sometimes.

They have, after all, all the time in anyone’s world. 

The TARDIS can cater to the whims and interests of any inhabitant (this he knows, somehow instinctively, too old a lesson to be lost). Rooms move and change and come into being; swimming pools with water slides, hydroponics units, libraries (both old oak shelved style and touch-screen white palaces), anti-grav squash, soufflé making, human tetris, mineral embroidery, aromatherapy and logic-chess – it’s all there, if you want it. 

Trying to find your way back again? To a room half-remembered? Another companion of another self, five hundred years ago and more?

The TARDIS can be singularly recalcitrant. 

The Doctor probably finds the Hall because he isn’t searching for it, just wandering, still chasing fragments and figments. This is about more than simply forgetting what _is_ , there are _maybes_ and _might-haves_ and _almosts_ in there as well - he’s lived a lot of paradoxes, a lot of memories that have no longer happened and people who happened backwards, or people who never should have happened. Some of the people haven’t quite been born and some were dead before he knew them. 

In the room of the TARDIS that is the Hall it is dim, most of the light in the space emanating from the wood fire at the centre of the room on the bare flagstones. The scent is smoke and peat and tallow grease. The grey stone walls are hung with tapestries; not the finest, but warm and homely, scenes of hunting and loving half-familiar. On the table lies a fine feathered cap and a pair of bagpipes, draped with bright tartan. 

And by the fire, seated on cushions, a boy, turning, setting aside the heavy book he’s holding – _The Hound of the Baskervilles_ – and smiling, and his face lighting up, firelight and the smile, the great joyful welcome of it...

“Doctor?” It’s the girl, the dark haired one, the one who’d been there at the beginning. “Doctor? What is it? Are you..?”

He pushes her aside, frustrated – for a moment he had known, so clearly, how and why and _who_. He had been safe, and known what he... something... someone...

“Did you know Jamie?” he asks her, because the name has stuck, though little else, however he reaches for it in his mind, all his minds.

She shakes her head, not unkindly. They’ve been doing a lot of this.

He looks round and sees the room is quite bare, nothing to see anymore anyway. 

“Perhaps you will,” he says, comforting himself more than her – she just looks weary, and a little sad, as she has since he’s known her. “Perhaps I will, yet. Perhaps it hasn’t happened.”

She gives a determined smile. “Let’s keep looking, eh? You’re bound to get everything back eventually.”

They are not in the room any more. But it’s there, somewhere, in the heart of the TARDIS, and, he thinks, in his own hearts too. 


End file.
